Now altough Enhancements and Plugins are both tied into your equipment its worth separating them out to go into greater depth so we will start with Stats. This guide will be broken up into the above 4 sections.
Section 1 – Stats:

Your officer has 3 important [Stats] Military, Leadership & Politic’s here is a quick breakdown of each stat:

1 – Military
Every additional 10 points will increase – Attack of all Ships by 1.
Fighter Armor by 1
Frigate Armor by 2
Cruiser Armor by 3
Battleship Armor by 4
Flagship Armor by 10

2 – Leadership
Every point added will increase the tonnage cap of the fleet by 30.

3 – Politics
Every additional point will increase the output of the 3 resources by 10. This only comes into affect when this Commander is appointed as your Governor.
Additionally you increase the Taxation of your planet by 1% for every 100 Politics points your Governor has.

You have 2 setups for your Commanders, one is the Governor for this Commander you only want to be putting points into Politics the aim of the game here is to maximise your production of resources, you need to drop every stat point into Politics to get the most of your planet.

Your second option is a Combat Commander, this is the Commander who leads your fleets hopefully to victory but sometimes into glorious death (sometimes that’s needed as well).

For the Combat Commander you ignore the Politics skill and focus on both the Military and Leadership skills. Both are hugely important, your Leadership increasing the size of the fleet you can command however the Military increases both the armour and firepower of your ships so finding a balance that suits you is hugely important. I personally go for a bit more Military than Leadership but others go the other way.
Now that we’ve had an overview of Stats we’ll talk breifly about Skills

Your commander is Randomly given 2 Skills this is from the list below:
Combat Commander Skills – Wind Fighter, Eagle, Raptor, Tempest, Vulcan Frigate, Destroyer, Hammer, Longbow, Battle Cruiser, Knight, Dreadnought, Aegis
Governer Skills – Fuel Physics, Crystallography, Metallurgy
Combat Commander Skills – Control Skill
The Control Skill is the only Skill that I believe (needs confirming with the GM’s) that you can’t get randomly when your Commander is first created/Obtained via the Adventure
The Combat Commander Skills such as Eagle, Tempest, Aegis etc for each Skill point you put into the Skill you gain 1% extra damage

For the Governer Skills you gain 100 resource production per Skill point spent
The Control Skill grants you 200 Additional Tonnage per Skill point spent to your Commanders Maximum Fleet size
Each Commander has 4 Skill “Slots” when you first create your Commander 2 of these are randomly filled as per above. To open the 3rd slot you need to spend 20 Daimonds, this is also the same for slot 4.

You can purchase skill books from the Item Mall for 20 Daimonds if you are seeking a specific setup for your officer, this can be advantageous later on in the game when you are starting to make use of the Plugin’s (But we’ll get to that in section 4).

Level’ing your Commander (XP and Honour)
Now getting onto Leveling up there are various methods of doing this, firstly and more easily when a Governor is appointed and remain in service to the planet they gain XP slowly throughout the day at a rate of 72XP points per hour.

You can train your Commanders at your Alliance Base (if you have one and at varying amounts depending on the progression of your Alliance this is not covered in this guide)

You gain XP from attacking other ships this can be other players, NPC fleets in Adventure and Planets even a very small amount from the pirates found at wormholes(Only 7 XP though).

Honour is gained in only 2 ways, firstly Running Ancient Battle Ground (referred to as ABG for the rest of this guide) Missions & from Medals. Medals can be obtained from daily quests, Item Mail, the Secret Market and also from Wormholes.

Section 2 – Equipment:

You can get hold of equipment via a number of ways, the Secret Market, Green/Blue & Purple Box’s & Rewards from ABG’s

Equipment dropped from ABG’s vary in level but also “quality” in order of quality you have the worst White, Green, Blue and finally Purple. The aim of the game is to gain a full set (Helmet, Brain Chip, Inductive Suit, Nerve Reinforcer, Glove, Laptop, Belt & Ring) of Purple Equipment for each Commander however for Combat Commanders you can use White Belts & Laptop’s while Governors only need Purple Belts & Laptops. The Belt & Laptop boost the Politics Stat as such they are of no use to Combat Commanders (except for Plungins) for Governors the Belt & Laptop are the only important equipment for the want reason however white, green or blue equipment for the other slots is useful for Plugins

Section 3 – Enhancements

Lets start the Enhancements by looking first at what the benefits of enhancing gear is.
The benefits are pretty simple each enhancement increases the Stat effect (Military, Leadership or Politics) of that piece of Equipment.

I personally only Enhance Kit III dropped equipment this is due to the cost of Enhancing each piece of Equipment but we’ll get into the costs shortly we’ll see where to get hold of the items you’ll need to begin your Enhancements
The things you need to begin Enhancing your Equipment
1 – Crystals
2 – Equipment item
3 – Nova Coins

Crystals you can gain from ABG’s starting at level 16, you can also purchase these from the Secret Market for 20,000 Nova (Personally these are massively over priced so don’t bother) or you can trade in 100 PvP points for one level 1 Crystal (We’ll get into Levels shortly)

To purchase Crystals using PvP points you need to click on the little flower shaped button just above your [Item Mall] button as per above and if you hold your mouse over your current score as highlighted you’ll PvP points earned over the whole duration of your game. (Legion Siege actually means Fortress Sieges)

Now lets assume you’ve purchased a number of Level 1 Crystals for 100 PvP points each, to find where they are go to your [Assets] button and then the Special Tab as per below

Now in the above you can see you now have a few Level 1 Crystals so lets go and pick an item from the Commander Tab and hit the FIT button for the item you wish to Enhance.

In the above picture you see the Enhancement options the first thing to note is that for each of those 4 Crystal slots highlighted in RED you “can” add in 1 Crystal of the appropriate level (we’ll discuss this shortly) for now as the Equipment Item is level 0 you only need level 1 Crystals to make the upgrade work. For each Crystal slot you fill you increase the chance of a successful upgrade by 25%. You start at 0%, now in the below picture you can see I’ve filled 3 of the Crystal Slots this has increased my chance to 75% however you can put in all 4 slots or 2 or 1 the risk and choice for doing so is your own.

Please note that whatever you put into the slots will be destroyed during the Enhancement process so if you put in 3 Crystals and fail you lose those 3 Crystals if you use 4 you will lose all 4 however there is NO chance of failure.
You will also need to pay a Nova cost as highlight in RED to cover the cost of the Enhancement the cost is paid regardless of success or failure.

Now accepting that this was successful you will see the following screen

This picture points out that the level of the item has increased to level 1 and you can see the effect which has added the +28 leadership points to this item. Each level makes that increase considerable greater I have a level 5 Item exactly the same as this one that has +272 so the increase can make a dramatic effect on the stats of your Commanders.

Now comes the painfully expensive part to make this Equipement level 2 we now need level 2 Crystals which you can’t buy but can be won from higher level ABG’s but also made from lower level Crystals please see the crystal table below

Once you have 3 level 1 Crystals you can “use” them to make a level 2 to do this all you have to do is have 3 or more level 1 Crystals in your Assets – Special Tab when you click on the [use] button you will be asked to pay 100 Nova Coins to create the level 2 Crystal doing so destroys all 3 level 1 Crystals.

In the same way you make level 3 Crystals however this requires 3 level 2 Crystals hitting the [use] button again this time however you’ll be asked to pay 300 Nova Coins. The amount of Nova Coins per level tripples for each level.
Enhancing the Equipment is done in exactly the same format as before however this time when you click on the Crystal slots you’ll be using Level 2 Crystals. One more thing to note is that the Nova Coin cost for Enhancing increases by 1,000 Nova Coins per level of the item starting at 1,000 all the way upto 10,000 Nova Coins however that will require a massive amount of Crystals so don’t worry about that cost for awhile

Section 4 – Plugins

Finally getting to the end of this Guide coming to a very important and highly disputed section.
Plugins can only be purchased using PvP points spent in the PvP window as shown above earlier for where to buy Crystals.

Plugins function in exactly the same way as Crystals with regards to leveling them up all you need is 3 level 1 Plugins of the same type then hit [use] and they will level up to level 2 NO Nova Coin cost for these though.
You have numerous Plugins available to you as per below:

Those highlighted in RED are Ship Class Plugin’s this boost 1 specific class of ships effective damage plus either a Military or Leadership Stat depending the piece of Equipment they are installed onto.

The Politics Plugin is purely for your Governor and as mentioned earlier in the guide this is something you should install on ALL the Governor’s equipment and the only reason you should give your Governors the junky (white/green/blue) quality pieces of equipment just as something to install your Politics Plugins into they serve no other purpose.

This is also the exact same reason why you equip your Combat Commanders with Laptops & Belts purely for you to install Plugins into.

Now we’ve talked about installing plugins but not the method so lets delve into that now.
Go back to the Assets – Commander and select the piece of equipment you wish to install the Plugin into. You need to hit the [FIT] button once again then rather than selecting the Enhance option from the window that pops up this time you select the “Install Plugin” option at the bottom

Now I the above image I’ve alread hit the box that is highlighted in RED this will display a list of Plugins for you to use, I’ve highlighted a Crusier Level 1 plugin you can see that if you hold your mouse over that Plugin it gives you a huge amount of information the first 8 pieces are related to what the Plugin will do for you depending on which piece of equipment it’s installed on ie a Ring this will grant you +15 Military Stat points.

It also lists below that information what you get for having more than 1 of those Plugins.

If you have 3 Cruiser Level 1 Plugins installed on this Commander you gain +5 points towards the Hammer Skill. If you have 5 of these installed you will then also gain +5 points towards the Longbow Skill. If you have every piece of Equipment installed with a Level 1 Crusier Plugin you gain +5 towards the BattleCrusier Skill.

Now these “set” bonuses stack so essentially you gain +5 Skill points toward each of those if you have all 8 install.
The MOST important thing here to understand is if your Commander does not have this skill then the bonuses do NOT work for you. So its important to pick your Plugins carefully. It’s also worth noting that if you had 6 level 1 Crusier plugin’s installed and 2 level 2 Crusier plungin’s installed you no longer meet the requirement for the BattleCruiser boost. So I personally tend to save up and push a whole level for all in one go.

The Control Plugin grants a boost both to Leadership then Military and then grants a Control Skill boost twice at 6 Items and 8 Items. This again only functions if you have the Skill on that officer.

When you finally come to picking and choosing what you want your officers to do there are 2 schools of thought.

1 – You work your Commanders to function as Class Specific Commanders for example you use your free Daimonds or bought to purchase all of 1 ship class ie Tempests, Vulcans and Destroyers and then only get plugin’s for those skills for that officer

2 – Purchase the Control Skill and focus your Plugin’s on boosting your Control Skill granting your more ships
This is essentially a choice between more ships or greater firepower.